I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for mitigating adverse impact due to pilots in a wireless communication network.
II. Background
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources. Examples of such multiple-access networks include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) networks, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) networks, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) networks, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) networks.
A wireless communication network may include a number of base stations that can support communication for a number of terminals. Each base station may support one or more cells and may periodically transmit one or more common pilots for each cell. A common pilot is a transmission that is known a priori by the terminals and is not associated with a transmission to a specific terminal. The common pilots from the cells may be used by the terminals for various purposes such as channel estimation, channel quality measurement, signal strength measurement, time/frequency tracking, etc. Information obtained from the common pilots (e.g., a channel estimate, a signal strength measurement, etc.) may be used for various tasks such as demodulation and decoding, serving cell selection, etc. It is desirable to send and receive the common pilots in a manner to achieve good performance.